Linking Accounts

This is a critical piece of functionality that is not obvious until testing connections to multiple social media accounts.

So I’m with the OP.. how does this plugin prevent creating multiple wordpress profiles?

Here’s a simplified scenario to demonstrate:
– joe has an account on facebook and googleplus
– joe discovers my site and wants to leave a comment but I require him to be logged in.
– joe registers and logs in using the facebook link and WSL dutifully creates a user named “joe” and now he can leave his comment.
– 2 weeks later joe comes back to my site and wants to leave another comment, he vaguely remembers logging in and thinks it might have been with googleplus (but he really does not care or should care), so he presses the googleplus WSL icon.
– since joe is logged in already to his g+ account, it approves him easily and he leaves his comment on my site and goes away.
– what just happened is WSL created a user named “joe_1” on my site and there is no way to know it’s the same guy.
– joe likes my site and decides to upload his avatar, location and a small bio and whatever.
– later he comes back when in a facebook mood, logs in and goes to look at his profile to update his bio, but it is blank so he cusses and says “that site is broken and I don’t trust it, because it lost all my info”.

This would happen even if joe had the same username on both facebook and g+.

How is this situation prevented? Should WSL recognize that “joe” already exists and ask the google joe if he is the same guy who registered as facebook joe? This must be a basic question that has been answered thousands of times. Maybe that is what the big paid services like janrain, gigya, loginradius, oneall, etc do? … somehow keep track of all of joe’s social ids of which my site is just one insignificant player.

Can it be done using WSL?

WSL matches users by email address, from what I see. I have a few users with same email and different providers and their Social Logins have been grouped together under the same user.

Only issue is Twitter and providers that you force an email to be provided and then WSL says duplicate user and can go no further. I think that’s a bug of sorts and have noted it elsewhere, with no reply or feedback, yet.

My question arises from that given scenario: account association across different providers is accomplished through e-mail matching.
So Twitter-like accounts could be linked only if forcing address insertion.
If you ever login at least one time with a social provider, being your profile registered with the same email, you should see the “Linked Accounts” additional tab in your profile page.

Obviously, this means that there is no way to link profiles with different email addresses, that’s why another plugin (unfortunately discontinued, but anyway less open) like Social Connect used to pair accounts in another “layer” (using usermeta if I remember correctly), and matching email only as a first automatic step of a fully managed selection process.

Developers have done a great work, but beyond the successful experiments and implementation of a global auth framework, the lack of such a feature would still prevent WSL to be fully usable and operational.

As I pointed out when opening this thread, it seems that there is already some underlying code and options not always visible in the admin UI… I hope we could soon see this crucial feature as one of the updates available in the “cominq release WSL 2.0”

I see now that it does link social profiles by e-mail and the first one registered through creates the username.

And a nice to have feature (although probably outside the scope of their original design of making it quick and easy for the user), would be what I think 3dolabs is saying, let the user themselves add/change/delete their social login profile.

FWIW: I’m now leaning the opposite way, since I want user participation within my site. I’m making a frontend self-managed user profile with fields that are relevant to content on my site and making the registration/login process very clear and functional. That’s based on this good read: https://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-it/

Good luck and have fun!